Understanding Direct3DX Textures

The Direct3DX utility library provides extensive texturing facilities to provide hardware independence to as great a degree as possible. Direct3DX will automatically search the capabilities of the chosen device to build a texture that is compatible with that device.

A texture is a DirectDrawSurface object that has been specially created to be used with the 3-D hardware on the system. Creating a texture using the Direct3DX utility library will ensure that the texture will be supported by the hardware.

The texturing functions in the Direct3DX utility library allow you to perform the following operations:

• Convert texture formats.
• Create cube-map textures.
• Create and load textures from files.
• Create textures.
• Generate mipmaps.
• Filter.
• Load textures from surfaces.

If you have authored your textures in one of the D3DX_SURFACEFORMAT standard texture types, the Direct3DX utility library will provide conversion to any of the other standard texture types; these types include 16-bit and 32-bit ARGB, a full set of RGB types, some compression formats and more.